michael_nielsen

Here is a recent Kaggle competition that caught my eye...surely participating in competitions like this would qualify as science? https://www.kaggle.com/c/trackml-particle-identification …

So I want to be very careful here. There are many ways to participate in science.

You could learn a lot from doing this—how to write code, get experience thinking clearly, logically, creatively. Sitzfleisch.

But this is where @michael_nielsen and I might part company: I don’t think working on GalaxyZoo is doing science.

Sounds like a not-terribly-interesting argument over definitions. Is a galaxy classification scientifically useful? Yes.

I’m happy to blur things usually but here I think the distinctions matter.

Why? This is a classic case of different degrees. There's a continuum between classifying a galaxy and doing Nobel prizewinning work. In fact, the Zooites show it, rather nicely, with many, many different levels of engagement & understanding.

The different degrees do matter, of course. But there are hundreds of them, and few (if any) people encompass all of them. I've known Nobel prizewinning scientists who understand little of the mathematical models they're testing; I've known others who've never collected any data